jerks inside her and she turns around to look. Beyond the windshield, standing on her hood, she sees a pair of leather boots.
She looks up, but can't see above his knees. The roof is blocking the rest of his body. The only other part of him she can see is the bottom of his long coat flapping at his legs. He's so close to her that she can see the color of the coat, dark green with a red flannel lining. Sitting here mesmerized she can literally count the buttons holding the lining into place.
BLAM!
Sue leaps, ears ringing, the gunshot coming from the roof of the Expedition above her head. Before she can tense up it happens again.
On reflex-at the moment, she has nothing else left in her arsenal-she throws the car into drive and hits the accelerator. The Expedition lurches to life. Something bumps off the roof and the man on her hood is gone. Sue takes the wheel and steers it back onto the road, looking in the rearview mirror but not seeing anything back there. He's just gone. The road ahead of her leading into Winslow is empty.
She drives fifty yards up the road, her stomach twisted backward on itself, the faint lights of Winslow beginning to prism in her eyes. When the road gets too blurry to drive she stops again, crosses her arms over her chest, and for a long time she just sits there holding on to herself and trembling. The dome light is still on and when she reaches around to switch it off with a clumsy, shock-stiffened arm she notices the kid sprawled across the backseat.
There are two bullet holes through the kid's eyes. Wisps of smoke are still floating from the sockets. Sue sees this but it doesn't register with her immediately. She is filled with the simultaneous urges to scream, throw up, and squeeze her own eyes shutBut she sublimates all of these urges, puts them aside, with the single thought of Veda waiting for her at the end of the line. Veda the punctuation mark, the only good reason, the final and absolute meaning in her otherwise iffy existence. Veda, whom she is prepared to kill for, whom she'll die trying to get back. The simplicity of the thought steels her, helps her focus, until it is the only thing she knows.
Veda.
Baby.
I'm coming. Mommy's coming. I promise.
And she drives the rest of the way into Winslow.
12:06A.M.
Winslow is only marginally less depressing than Gray Haven. It's deserted here as well, the sidewalks lit by occasional streetlights so she can see empty storefronts along with a barbershop and a boarded-up Depression- era movie theater called the Bijou. A dilapidated church made of fieldstone rises above the square. The local bar on the corner is the Crow's Tap and there is indeed a sign above the door with a picture of a crow tapping its beak against a keg. But if there's anyone getting a nightcap inside, they're doing it in the dark. Not the faintest trace of light trickles through the bar's front window. There are no footprints in the blanket of snow that lies across the town, no trace of life anywhere. And like Gray Haven, Winslow seems to be a town inhabited only by bad memories and worse weather.
A speed limit sign commands her to slow to 25 and Sue automatically lifts her foot from the pedal, not wanting to get pulled over by the town's one cop. Considering her current cargo of corpses, a routine speeding violation would turn into tomorrow'sUSA Today headline for the deputy lucky enough to stumble across it. She isn't really thinking about any of this-in her current frame of numbness it would be a mistake to say that she's technicallythinking about anything at all-but she knows if she gets stopped that she will never see her daughter again. This again is nightmare logic, but it is logic just the same. It is the kind of blessed circular logic, beloved of zealots and extremists everywhere, that means she doesn't have to think about it anymore beyond that.
But the doubts remain.
What if I do start thinking about it right now? The dead bodies, the kidnapping, the route, the voice on the phone-will I go crazy? Will my brain just throw up its hands and say That's it, I quit? Exactly how much horror and shock is the mind capable of absorbing, really?
She pushes it away.
At twenty-five miles an hour Main Street seems to go on forever. She speeds up, risking thirty-five, then forty. Despite the wind blowing in through the broken window, she's flushed, her cheeks and earlobes burning. She feels hot and dizzy, as if she has the flu.
Her eyes dart out the windows. She tries to pay attention to the town, to figure out why the voice would be so insistent that she detour through here on her way east. But there's nothing to see. She passes a gun shop, a creepily deserted hobby store called Pastimes on the Square, some cheap housing waiting to be bulldozed, a vacant lot, and at the top of the next hill, a barren-looking little park with a statue of a man standing on a pedestal.
He's bald with muttonchops, dressed in a long coat, holding the familiar bone-saw in his right hand as he gazes off to the west.
It looks just like the figure that stands in Sheckard Park in Gray Haven. Isaac Hamilton, the name that the kid mentioned to her.
However, there's one slight difference-this version of the statue has only one arm.
It's odd enough for Sue to look twice, sure she's just seeing it at a peculiar angle, but no, the arm is gone. The left one, to be exact, the one that was holding the Bible back in Gray Haven, is missing from the shoulder. Sue has no idea why two towns would have the same historic figure immortalized in their parks, and right now she couldn't care. Except that Isaac Hamilton is linked to the towns, and the kid linked Isaac Hamilton to the Engineer…all of which brings her one step closer to understanding the man who kidnapped her daughter.
Then again the kid also said that the Engineer murdered his brother three years ago, which Sue knows is flatly impossible.
She passes the statue and sees the entire village green is full of little statues, and realizes it's not a park at all. It's a cemetery. It spreads its old, flat, bald stones out across the snowy field like candy that somebody's sucked the letters off of, and she starts to hear the poem echo through her head, the one that starts 'From Ocean Street in old White's Cove.' All at once, boom, the headache that she felt between her eyes comes back. It's not a flu feeling anymore, it's more like a low-pressure system moving in. The dizziness in her head turns to nausea. Something else is different too, an odd crawling twinge in her chest and abdomen that she can't quite pinpoint.
Sue floors the accelerator and speeds up as if she could leave the words and feelings behind her, but the cemetery keeps going and so does the poem in her head. She's out of breath, her lungs feeling too small to deliver air. Her head is pounding. What is it about these towns, this route, and, as the kid said, the history of murder in New England?
She's almost past the cemetery when she hears a muffled scratching coming from underneath the dashboard to her right. It's mixed in with a sliding sound, like something is trying to drag itself up a vertical surface and keeps falling. Sue follows the noise down to the cardboard box with the two steamed lobsters that Sean Flaherty gave her, six hours ago.
The box has started shifting from side to side.
Sue stares at it. The lobsters inside are dead, of course. They've been dead ever since the good people at Legal Seafood dropped them in a pot for Sean at five this afternoon.
Inside the box the scraping grows more animated. She can hear clicking sounds too, quick angry snaps,
